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When a body is moving energy through it, that moving energy needs to drain out of the body. This is vitally important. This is the same concept as a sink with running water. The water must constantly drain, or it gets back up. That's exactly what happens with your body when we don't properly drain the energy AS it runs through.

A few misconceptions. We do not get power from the ground. The earth has no power. It's receptive. All power in the earth comes from the sun. See the "Trees grow from the air, not the ground video" in this forum. Even power that's in the earth, came/comes from the sun.

When you jump a car battery, all the power comes from the positive lead. The ground lead can be attached anywhere on the car that will allow the charge to drain. Often the frame of the car is even better than the negative contact on the battery.

The best way to decouple a body, is to provide a structure at the bottom of the body that best allows the energy to drain the most efficiently.

Flat feet: Have you ever had neighbors above you that had speakers directly on the floor - and it felt like the music - especially the low end - was just booming all over the place. What they'd basically done is to turn their entire floor - and the walls - and to some degree the entire building into a big speaker. Feet placed flatly on the ground - or floor - act in the same way as your neighbors speakers on the floor. And those vibrations and built up resonances not only go back into the speaker body (your body) but they also "couple" with the floor and walls. Making all that "one body." A big mess.

You've also heard of a "heat sink" a similar process. It drains the heat away by quickly draining the heat (energy) to a larger surface area where it can dissipate. And that's why they call a kitchen sink a "sink." Sink does not mean to "lower your body structure vertically." It means to discharge the energy in your body through your legs - to your feet and toes - and out in the the ground.

The energy in your body, in order to drain and dissipate fast enough so that you don't turn into a big overcharged battery - is by "decoupling" your body with the ground/floor. The way to do that is by forming a smaller coupled surface at the lowest part of the structure- ideally in an upside down cone shape - that allows the energy to spiral downward - out of the body - and into the ground/floor.

You have something that's shaped just like upside-down cones on your feet. The toes.

If you've ever seen those pointy legs on a kick drum, people might think it's to stick into the floor to keep the drum from sliding. Well, that may be one of the side benefits. But the purpose of the spike is to "decouple" the drum from the floor - allowing the energy to drain - rather than remain in the drum.

You can see this also with the use of inverted cones under audiophile speakers, turntables, audio equipment, and audio storage racks. The purpose is to "decouple" and drain the energy moving through the various components.

Contrary to some popular believe, components and bodies can not be "isolated." You put a big piece of foam under a speaker and isolate it - because you can't isolate the speaker from itself. So, even with foam under it - the energy doesn't drain. In fact foam can make it even worse, because you're adding an acoustically absorbant material to the structure of the speaker, making the body of the speaker even more dead.

So, if you're come this far, that gets us back to draining the residual energy from our bodies - that's not expelled by movement - into the ground. Let's get back to those upside-down toes. The cones. Our body's own decoupling devices.

We want the shape on the feet to take up as little surface of the ground as possible, and also concentrate on the toes - with the most attention to the big toe. You will often see those experienced in aiki up on their toes and ball of the foot. This creates 7 decoupling cones - one on each toe, and two on the ball - one each near the outside of the ball of the foot.

Irimi - is not a "step." Irimi is a movement - directed by the core. The movement of irimi places major emphasis on the big toe. On the physical level, the big toe is absolutely the business end of irimi - as it decouples the body and drains the energy produced in the body, by the movement of the core, into the ground.

That is where the power of the movement comes from. The power does not result from bringing it up from the ground. There is no power in the ground. The power is created by the continuous flow of positive energy into the body.

Energy that remains in the body when it is not desired, is called "negative energy." Negative energy is great when it runs into the ground. It's not so great when it is in your body. That's having the "sink" back up.

I hope this gives you a better and more accurate understanding of the term "sink."

Hopefully, with these initial notes you understand more about the importance of decoupling. I want to work this into something that's simple with examples that are easy to understand. So, any questions and comments are welcome. Cheers...

You lost me too. This seems a discourse on purely speculative matters, yet it is presented with a particular authority.

Are you talking about bio-mechanical energy or some sort of spiritual energy? It is never entirely clear, at least not to me.

In your first post you reference a skin "topology", but as a topologist I'm not sure that's the word you want.

In your second post you make analogies to decoupling in electronics, but that is a matter of ensuring that separate sub-systems have independent energy supplies (e.g. you know how your radio may cut out when you start your car? those are not decoupled subsystems or you would not see that effect). Again I'm not sure this is the word you want.

All that aside, I think that the mental structures people build up to make sense of aikido (and no doubt a great many other endeavors) are a very interesting and at times mysterious thing. O Sensei understood certain things via the kami, Koichi Tohei as ki, perhaps you as resonance and damping (I don't want to speak for you...). Why do so many of us build up these icons and symbols to understand our practice? And because aikido is as much a mental art as a physical one, how do these mental structures manifest themselves in our practice? To me this is a significant question in understanding aikido.

You bring up a good point about topology. Even just the fact that it's not clear is enough for me to chuck it out. How about the word "model."

OK, here' s rough draft of the quicky "elevator pitch."

============================================

All we're going to do here is take an already existing drum - our bodies. Tune up the entire skin - as a single skin - like a drumhead. From that - the body resonates more clearly. We then decouple the resonator through the feet (mainly the toes) - to allow for draining energy into the ground. And the last bit is to work with the torso - which is the main resonator. The outer part of the torso/shell resonator is the circumference of the hips in rotation. The inner part of the torso/shell is circumference of sacral rotation. The inner part is also known as the core. That inner core is the same as a magnet on a speaker. We then - with some practice - build a unified body that can be efficiently move from the core.

============================================

We put these simple parts together, in an easily understandable model that people can get - without any confusion - and start using - and getting results.

These posts are me riffing off some notes, and wanting people to come along and help me whittle it down to something simple and easily understandable. Your comments are exactly what I'm looking for to tighten this all up.

I like what you wrote on the last paragraph. I want to chew on it a bit, and I'll reply to that in another post.

The baseline entree point into internal strength - pointing at lots of common ground (pun intended), commonalities and similarities laid out by many giants in both CMA and JMA is that notion of balancing the intersection of gravity pulling you down and the earth below you pushing up - basics of groundpath to use the Sigman terminology - so that any external force that's presented to you, is able to be directed to the ground in as pure a form as possible. That's by no means the full extent of "sourcing power from the ground" but it's the very basic entry point that most point to when you talk commonalities and overlaps of varying noted perspectives of IS.

If you're postulating that power comes from the sun - it's a basic deviation of imagery, but I can forgive it if you're expanding the physics notions to include the gravitational effects of the sun on the earth and how we exist in the middle, but since you jump into the spiral mechanics bits and tie the decoupling to rooting with your toes, it's too much of a stretch when there's too many other components in the progression that I haven't seen referenced, yet.

Be that as it may -- keep going with your metaphor, I'll reserve more scrutiny until you've fleshed it out a bit more. Right now it seems like it's a loose idea, but I can't tie it very well to traditional notions of internal strength and the pseudo-science isn't rigorous enough to withstand hard testing.

The baseline entree point into internal strength - pointing at lots of common ground (pun intended), commonalities and similarities laid out by many giants in both CMA and JMA is that notion of balancing the intersection of gravity pulling you down and the earth below you pushing up - basics of groundpath to use the Sigman terminology - so that any external force that's presented to you, is able to be directed to the ground in as pure a form as possible. That's by no means the full extent of "sourcing power from the ground" but it's the very basic entry point that most point to when you talk commonalities and overlaps of varying noted perspectives of IS.

Thanks, Budd.

The idea that the "earth" is pushing anything up - is incorrect. The Earth "sucks," literally.

That pushing up is not occurring. What is occurring is the releasing of the temporarily-stored positive energy. If you squat down, and then jump up - the power is not coming from the earth. It's coming from the stored energy in your legs that you compressed when you did the squat. And the energy is not released up. It's released down. That why we go up. The energy is drained - most effectively - and "in as pure a form as possible" through the decoupling of the body and the earth - through the inverted cones created by mainly the toes. And out of the toes - mainly at a point on the bottom of the big toe.

The idea that the "earth" is pushing anything up - is incorrect. The Earth "sucks," literally.

That pushing up is not occurring. What is occurring is the releasing of the temporarily-stored positive energy. If you squat down, and then jump up - the power is not coming from the earth. It's coming from the stored energy in your legs that you compressed when you did the squat. And the energy is not released up. It's released down. That why we go up. The energy is drained - most effectively - and "in as pure a form as possible" through the decoupling of the body and the earth - through the inverted cones created by mainly the toes. And out of the toes - mainly at a point on the bottom of the big toe.

This might be a primary disconnect, then - since if you're not understanding how the ground provides a counter force to gravity - without you having to do anything, flex any muscles, etc. Internal strength at it's baseline takes advantage of that when you push on the ground, the ground pushes back - how purely you've trained your body (to cite your example of the legs above - there's much more than that going on) to capitalize on this will affect the effect you have when you move/hit/throw with internal strength.

This might be a primary disconnect, then - since if you're not understanding how the ground provides a counter force to gravity - without you having to do anything, flex any muscles, etc. Internal strength at it's baseline takes advantage of that when you push on the ground, the ground pushes back - how purely you've trained your body (to cite your example of the legs above - there's much more than that going on) to capitalize on this will affect the effect you have when you move/hit/throw with internal strength.

I agree with - - without you having to do anything, flex any muscles, etc. Because, there is absolutely no "pushing" involved. At all. In any way. Ever. There is only releasing/draining.

And you'll come around on the rest. : ) This is simple physics. Jet propulsion. Even bottle rockets - fueled by carbon. What's carbon? Stored energy from the sun. The bottle rocket doesn't go up - or in your neighbor's wife's beehive hairdo - because it's pushing or being pushed. It's being propelled ( <--- note that word ) by the release of the energy in the carbon.

When you make a campfire, what makes the wood burn? Where does the energy come from to produce the fire? The earth. bzzz. Sorry, wrong answer. The tree. bzzz. Ooh, sorry again, wrong answer. Contestant number three... The sun. ding, ding, ding, ding. Hal, we have a winner, tell him what he's won.

If the ground doesn't push back, you sink into the ground and gravity wins. It's called the "ground reaction force." When you jump, you may provide the energy (ok, ATP does - ok glucose does - ok, the sun makes the photosynthesis that makes the starches that get turned into ATP that gets used to produce muscular contractions which you use to cause your legs (lever system) to push on the ground and jump. When the force created by you against the ground is greater than the force holding you on the ground (gravity) you jump. But if the ground didn't push back, your feet would sink. If you jump on thin ice, it's not able to push back enough, and your feet go through (brr).

This might be a primary disconnect, then - since if you're not understanding how the ground provides a counter force to gravity - without you having to do anything, flex any muscles, etc. Internal strength at it's baseline takes advantage of that when you push on the ground, the ground pushes back - how purely you've trained your body (to cite your example of the legs above - there's much more than that going on) to capitalize on this will affect the effect you have when you move/hit/throw with internal strength.

The ground does not provide a counter force to gravity in the sense of the ground manufacturing energy and adding it to the ground/person system. The stability of bulk matter (the reason the ground supports you, even under reasonable loading) is explained by the Pauli exclusion principle (short range) in combination with Coulomb's law (long range). Reference http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauli_e...lity_of_matter.

Even if you wish to contend that Pauli and Coulomb are forces, the net gain/loss of energy in the system as a whole is zero, the system is in a state of equilibrium. In short, the ground does not provide you with any usable potential energy which you may convert to kinetic energy and use to perform work.

Ron

ps - If someone can show me the physics of how "Internal strength at it's baseline takes advantage of that when you push on the ground, the ground pushes back " I will happily stand corrected.

ps - If someone can show me the physics of how "Internal strength at it's baseline takes advantage of that when you push on the ground, the ground pushes back " I will happily stand corrected.

Hold a steel pole (or any solid, strong material) to your chest, start running as fast as you can and then drop that pole into the ground like a pole vaulter would. While laying on the ground sorting things out you can ask yourself if it was the pole that laid you out or if it was the solidity of the ground pushing back at you, the force, through the pole.

The ground does not provide a counter force to gravity in the sense of the ground manufacturing energy and adding it to the ground/person system. The stability of bulk matter (the reason the ground supports you, even under reasonable loading) is explained by the Pauli exclusion principle (short range) in combination with Coulomb's law (long range). Reference http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauli_e...lity_of_matter.

Another way of understanding mass inertia under the Pauli exclusion principle is by analogy to a randomized angular momentum field. All mass particles have intrinsic spin regardless of charge (Pauli) AND many have an "orbital" spin (Coulomb) between charged particles. Spin, like a gyroscope, resists planar rotations. This is the source of many properties we associate with the mass of matter.

Fermions (which exhibit "mass") obey the exclusion principle and have half-integer spin. The -- half integer spin -- is like a single gyro (or an odd and therefore unbalanced number of them). Being randomized the single gyro (half-integer) spins of a mass of fermion particles resist all applied moments in all orientations more or less equally (push or pull), hence the inertial mass properties of matter.

Bosons (like photons and Cooper pairs and few others) have integer spin -- and do not obey the exclusion priniciple -- Integer spin is like each particle having two equal and opposite half-integer gyroscopes at right angles to one another (or a balanced and even number of them). They don't interfere with each other at all. But since each automatically counters the out of plane resistance of the other when a planar rotation is applied -- no resulting resistance is seen and thus mass inertia is not a property of bosons. What seems a lack of a property is in fact a great deal more of something else.

Inertial cancellation is seen when spins of fermions are paired in a way to make them a zero-spin condensate -- which makes then into a constructive boson, and thus losing many mass properties. Superfluid helium exhibits this inertial cancellation -- and for this reason -- as it achieves a zero-spin state.

Photons have zero mass. But photons have momentum and often a very large amount of it. Radiometers work. Gamma rays, anyone? (Paging Dr. Banner!) (Query: Does the Hulk exhibit internal strength/power?)

This analogy to macroscopic spins illustrates why zero mass with momentum can be the case -- and why momentum, which we usually treated as a synthetic quantity of mass times velocity, is actually a more fundamental quantity of nature than mass. Mass can be seen as merely one analytic abstract of the more concrete quantity of momentum. The orienting aspect of orbiting charged particles under Coulomb's Law is left as an exercise for the class.

My head is spinning.......if we need the smallest possible connection to drain the power stored in our bodies, the toes and balls of the feet, why is circle walking so important to some CMA? Damn, why was I an English major? Do you want fries while you explain your theories?

My head is spinning.......if we need the smallest possible connection to drain the power stored in our bodies, the toes and balls of the feet, why is circle walking so important to some CMA? Damn, why was I an English major? Do you want fries while you explain your theories?

Circle walking trains the body to use alternating torque stresses (closing and opening, weighted and unweighted) from core to the ground and to extremities and back again.

Hold a steel pole (or any solid, strong material) to your chest, start running as fast as you can and then drop that pole into the ground like a pole vaulter would. While laying on the ground sorting things out you can ask yourself if it was the pole that laid you out or if it was the solidity of the ground pushing back at you, the force, through the pole.

Assuming the pole is of sufficient diameter to not go through me when I drop it to the ground, what knocks me down is the fact that my chest and the end of the pole cannot occupy the same space at the same time. My forward momentum is stopped in the upper half of my body while the lower half of my body carries on, taking me off my feet. The kinetic energy I supplied by running experiences a sudden change of direction and I am, in effect, moving in two directions at once. The ground provides no force, only a stable place for the pole to rest.

Try the same experiment without any forward momentum supplied by you. Stand still and lean into the pole with all the energy you can muster... you will not fall... you will not be propelled backwards... you will not enjoy the feeling of the pole jabbing into your chest.

Alternating torque stresses and dual spirals......as I understand it, one of the fundamental principles of circle walking is to place the foot flat on the deck with all surfaces of the foot touching at once. That seems to be the exact opposite of what the OP suggests builds this amazing strength. Am I misunderstanding what the OP wrote? Am I misunderstanding the principle of circle walking I mentioned? Aren't they mutually exclusive?

Michael, watch the feet in this "Walking the Circle" video. He's moving heal-to-toe. And watch as the back foot - at any given point - leaves the ground. The last contact he makes is with the big toe. Decoupling and draining the energy before the foot moves into the next position - directed by the core.

This is a good short video of Tissier doing irimi nage. The second half is in slow mo. Watch his feet. Watch his toes. And watch how at the end of the movement he even moves his core forward enough that the back left foot rises a bit off the ground. Leaving just the front right foot - with the big toe as the decoupler for his entire body. The timing of uke being released corresponds simultaneously with the draining of the energy into the ground from the front big toe. The energy of uke is drained through nage as well.

Even notice the two small irimi movements at 14-17 seconds. There's serious drainage going on all over the place. For anyone looking to "get this" idea of decoupling, even on an intellectual level, watch this video over and over.

Shioda has a masterful outer embodiment of this concept. Whereas some aikidoka might have hidden it a bit more, Shioda is clearly flaunting it. Watch his feet. Just his feet. Keep in mind the spiraling draining of energy. And zoom in on his big toes. Don't look at anything else.

When a body is moving energy through it, that moving energy needs to drain out of the body. This is vitally important. This is the same concept as a sink with running water. The water must constantly drain, or it gets back up. That's exactly what happens with your body when we don't properly drain the energy AS it runs through.

Another thing, the old, old saying about jin is that it "begins in the soles of the feet, is directed by the waist and manifested in the fingertips." That is all within the body.

My understanding of this is that this jin within the body is springy and repellant to pressure--peng jin is the "ward off" energy. If you push someone who has peng jin, none of your force enters his body. It is repelled and redirected by the peng energy. So you neither send nor receive energy because your jin stays inside you and their force gets shed to the ground.

This is similar to what you're saying but I feel that either I'm missing what you're saying or you're missing the nature of peng.

Quote:

Dan Richards wrote:

A few misconceptions. We do not get power from the ground. The earth has no power. It's receptive. All power in the earth comes from the sun. See the "Trees grow from the air, not the ground video" in this forum. Even power that's in the earth, came/comes from the sun.

Well, what is gravity? I don't think the sun is involved in that. Gravity comes from the mass of the earth and that is the "ground power"--the pull of the earth on the body. No energy comes into or goes out of the body in that. The jin power comes from working in accordance with that downward power of the earth. The human nervous system reacts to the pressure of weight on the feet by extending the spine in exactly the opposite direction--straight up. And I believe this response is an expression of peng jin and its source in martial arts.

So your comments leave me uncertain about what you mean.

David

"That which has no substance can enter where there is no room."
Lao Tzu